Customer Reviews

Andrew Motion Selected Poems, 1976-1997 (Faber poetry)

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The impression I get from reading this poetry is that underneath all of the poetic techniques and references to other poets there is very little. It is too safe, mediocre and polite. It is full of things like 'invisible and silent but the deep/ Foundation of ourselves, our cornerstone'. This attempt at quiet profundity doesn't work for me.

Nothing is transformed in this poetry. The world would be the same place without it.

His poem for the British victims of 9/11 was 3 stanzas and one sentence of musing on death, competently written and with poetic techniques used, but of no probity regarding the event.

Likewise his poem against the war, the point of which seemed to be the 'irony' that the region is a place historically associated with civilisation and now is the site of a war. So what? That kind of comment can be found in any newspaper column.

The convincing emotion in this selection of poems is grief and Motion's unending quarrel with his mother's early death is the pulse of his career. The opening poem wanders in a present life but closes inexorably in the past, with his father's hand pushing back hair from a hospital bed-ridden mother's "desperate face" and "the way love looks, its harrowing clarity."

It is not clear what did for her, "A Blow to the Head" one long mid-career sequence calls it, but the emotional shut-down of the mother, her eyes that "refuse to recognise..and turn away", leave a residue in all the things Motion considers and it is grief where he finds full throated voice.

There are syntactical, grammatical infelicities in the earlier poems - "the more I think back to your house/I grew up in" - which jarrs and the poems have been revised for this volume and such blips are absent from later poems so I wonder why these are still here. But grief, even in the guise of another person's feelings, another person's excuses for grief, spills most strongly from the poems, even if it's grief for an animal which suddenly arises, compassion disguised as a social comedy in the late poem "The Spoilt Child" and its abandoned, wounded dog. And it is grief which Motion becomes more articulate, more debonaire in handling over the course of these books, grief, which is the cost of things.

Dramatic monologues and historical pastiches are a strong suit - these miniature novels often cram the sketch of a whole life consummately into a page or five. But the theme's the same: in "Independence" the long saga of a career and courtship in the Punjab and its aftermath only becomes more than history book clippings when the character loses and mourns his wife:
"collapsing dresses into tea chests,/scooping up the baby things, /your belts, a thrown-down petticoat... So much of you to find!" Which story ends with the Motion speaker's usual emotional pitch when not spurred into mournful song: "Sun is no more/than a white, widening slit. The sea/ a blank horizon returning to grey."

There is great temptation with the biographer of Larkin, let alone another Laureate-in-waiting, to compare his work with that master's - but only here and there does he strike a Larkinesque attitude - very successfuly. The poem "Hull" acknowledges Larkin before the speaker, at the end of the affair, looks out of the flat of his soon to be abandoned lover at the plant house below where strangers "nod to each other through floppy-tongued leaves" and a minah bird will say nothing "except- if you scare him badly enough - his name." The little humour piece "It is an Offence" discusses the defecation of the neighbour's whippet ("surprisingly slow for a whippet") with similarly Larkinesque clipped moans.

But it is the two animal stories I like best - "The Dancing Hippo" where Motion ably ventriloquises a circus manager and the trainer of a hippo who after learning to dance ("that we thought nothing/but seemed to them a miracle") is burnt to death. In his grief the trainer burst into the manager's van: "I know it was useless, of course, her dancing./I know. But God above it was beautiful!/Beautiful! God! - or something like that." Motion here is a master of the foreign voice, the colourful detail and does not show an inch too much of the borrowed gaberdine.

And then there is "Reading the Elephant" where another mourning spouse of sorts is "turning time back on itself" on Safari in Africa where he tries to get back to the beginning of things: "They never last long, these moments. With half a chance/We drop back to life as it is. I understand that./I'm not quite a fool. So to keep myself airborne I always/snapped open some book (some parachute) just as my trance/was ending..." then he gets stared out by an elephant coming upon him suddenly, to leave him "with everything clear." And so Motion actually is, a mind ready to fall back into distances and literary fugues unless it is jerked to by that death or other dangers which always recall that death, still holding him fast "standing on a frozen pond/entranced by someone else below the ice" ("Dead March"), and it is only the death of a friend, Ruth Haddon, and her elegy "Fresh Water" which can end in some second hand peace as he imagines her drowned form leaving the sunk ship, The Marchioness, "swimming back upstream, her red velvet party dress/flickering round her heels as she twists through the locks" back to the source of the Thames, the "wet mouth of the earth" where she vanishes, his mother.

A review of a book is a a singular piece of advice from a 'point of view' of the reader, to another reader? Andrew's selection of Keats' work is a well worthy read for any 'newcomer' or, for that matter, anyone interested in poetry and prose.